I am the daughter of a compulsive gambler. Although I am a successful
professional, with a loving husband and a beautiful family, my father’s
weakness for gambling scarred my childhood and exerted a profound effect on
my adulthood. It has all but destroyed my parents’ marriage; the family home
was eventually sold to avoid repossession.
Now in his seventies, my father remains addicted, defending his gambling as a
“lifestyle choice”, and has turned to illegal moneylending to fund his
habit. My arms and my spirit are tired from trying to drag him from the
gutter.
As citizens, we joke that every hand of poker, every turn of the roulette
wheel, every pull of the fruit machine, parts a fool from his money. But
many of those fools have spouses and children. There are wives, like my
mother, who wonder each night whether her husband will come home after his
day job. If Father, a teacher, hadn’t turned up by about 6pm, she – and my
brother and me – would know that he was gone for the night. We would do our
homework, eat our dinner quietly, and never acknowledge the elephant in the
room that my father’s absence had become.
Weekends were worse: we knew that Father would not come home on a Friday
evening. I went to bed listening for his key in the lock; on Saturday
morning I used to listen intently to noises downstairs to deduce whether he
had returned. It readied me for the atmosphere that prevailed at breakfast:
would my parents be mounting a joint performance of brittle congeniality, or
would my mother still be alone downstairs, buttering toast, holding back
tears and mentally preparing to bite her tongue when he walked through the
door?
I preferred it when Father came back during the night; seeing him return in
the daytime, dishevelled and ashamed and penniless, choked me inside and
forced me to confront the fact that things in the family were not right. It
also meant that we were denied his fun, his energetic company during the
day, while he slept off the excesses of his nocturnal activities.
Once he was up and about, usually about lunchtime, not a single word about it
would be said. My mother would then scoop us up and go shopping, presumably
to punish him for leaving her alone.
I never asked my father to spend more time with us because I never knew that
things could be different. Sometimes he would disappear for the entire
weekend. My parents argued when they thought that we were not listening;
this always ended with Father quietly reaching for his car keys and walking
out of the house.
He is not from a dissolute family: among his five brothers are a professor, a
banker and an engineer. All of them have pleaded with Father to seek
treatment, to no avail. He no longer speaks to any of us, mainly because we
will not give him money.
My brother Jack, a management consultant, and me, an advertising executive,
are now in our forties. We both lead comfortable, middle-class lives, with
children in private schools, mortgages, regular holidays and polite dinner
parties – to which we would never dream of inviting Father. He has shown no
respect for his family or himself, and I would prefer that my children were
shielded from it.
My mother is utterly in love with her four grandchildren; she loses herself in
them as, I think, a way of surviving. She is still married to my father but
they live separate lives under the same roof.
His health is failing but he still finds the energy to fritter away his teacher’s
pension at the gaming tables. Unlike most friends, I cannot expect an
inheritance.
When Jack and I were young, my mother kept the worst from us. I learnt that
Father had once tried to access our child benefit, presumably to gamble it.
It is no wonder that my mother always kept a secret bank account – and
why she once contemplated suicide. That revelation came as a terrible shock;
she was always so loving and outwardly cheerful. I dread to think – I really
do – about what my life and my brother’s life might have been like had she
kicked the chair away. It was that same thought, she says, that stopped her.
I feel unutterably sad writing this, especially as my own husband and children
have brought me untold happiness. But my whole life has been geared to
moving as far away as possible from the familial model in which I was raised.
Mother lived in hope that my dad would “get better”, and revert to his kind,
funny, get-up-and-go self. Sometimes he did: the unexplained absences would
dry up, the family coffers would swell and we would become a normal family
again.
But I swore to myself that I would never show the same blind faith in a man,
never live the life that my mother did, filled with unrealised hopes, deep
uncertainty and bitter recriminations.
I married a kind, clever, even-tempered, penniless student who built a life
for us through hard work, intelligence and self-discipline. It was only
years later that I realised that my instant, deep attraction to Jonathan was
because he represented everything that my father was not.
He is a faultless father to Lily and Joe; my mother envies us our marriage. I
imagine Jonathan and I growing old together, becoming grey and toothless
together; yet I will never share a bank account with him.
Neither will I give up work: I will never be financially dependent on someone
else, as my mother was while she brought us up. If you have no money to
strengthen your hand, you resort to another currency: his money can end up
paying for her silence, her loyalty, her child-rearing, even her intimacy.
Jonathan was the first soul outside my family to know our seedy family secret.
And this is another cross that gamblers’ families must bear: the shame and
the secrecy. My brother and I just knew – although I can’t remember being
told it – that we should never tell anyone about Father’s extracurricular
activities. If word had leaked out, his job would be on the line.
His weekend absences also made it difficult for my mother to make social
commitments; it was so much easier to refuse than to cancel without
explanation later. She could hardly spill the beans to family friends.
Suburban gossip and the subsequent ostracism would have destroyed her.
Instead she chose isolation.
I have come to feel sad rather than angry at Father; it has taken me all my
life to accept that his compulsion is probably something that lies outside
his, and our, control. He is almost childlike in his inability to rein in
his destructive impulse.
Even writing this, I feel separate from him: he is not “my father” but
“Father”, like a character in a Dickens novel.
— All names have been changed
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